Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Yes, he was a time traveler. In fact, he had lived through this month many, many times, and they had talked before.

Jornak believed him. He wanted to believe him. His life had been rather dreary and frustrating for several years by that point. His career wasn’t going anywhere, despite his attempts to build connections and increase his social standing. He had no success in love. His family was long dead. The inheritance of House Denen, his best chance at achieving greatness, was stolen from him. His youth was all but spent, and he felt he wasn’t going anywhere. This looping time travel thing may have been completely insane, but Jornak was willing to take a chance on it.

The two became fast friends. Zach explained that he had originally found Jornak because he’d befriended Veyers in one of the restarts, and the boy had introduced him to his lawyer friend. Zach’s story about his caretaker selling Noveda property for pocket change to his friends and then siphoning most of the money into his pockets fascinated Jornak almost as much as the time travel story itself.

He wasn’t that unique in his realization that Zach was a time traveler. Zach had been making a lot of noise during that particular restart, handing out clues to various people he was fond of, and a number of them had reached the same conclusion he had. Zach was also dating no less than two women at the time – both of them aware of the other and fine with it – and he’d outright told them the truth long before Jornak had met him. It was… a fascinating group. He’d made a lot of new friends that month.

There was a looming shadow over the whole thing, however, and it grew colder and more obvious with every passing day. Zach Noveda wasn’t a mage who invented time travel, merely a leaf caught in the storm. The mechanics of the time loop were merciless, and they would soon strike.

As the end of the month approached, some people in the group got increasingly concerned. Jornak was one of them. During one evening when they were alone, and Zach had a little too much to drink, he admitted to Jornak that he would eventually stop interacting with him altogether. It had happened repeatedly in the past: Zach would get to know someone, interact with them over and over again, get emotionally attached to them, and then decide it was too painful to be around them in the future.

The admission shook Jornak to his core. He wasn’t sure why. He wouldn’t really remember anything soon, so why did it matter that Zach would replace him with someone else in one of the future restarts? It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. He grew increasingly desperate, constantly probing Zach for any ideas about how he can keep existing after the month was over. He recruited the other members of Zach’s group into his efforts, and eventually they managed to force an admission out of him.

There was a way. A divine artifact, held by a lich, that could confer the status of a temporary looper upon a person. It would only be for six restarts, and Zach explained again and again why he didn’t want to do it, why it was a bad idea, and so forth. It didn’t matter – not to Jornak, and not to the other people. Six months was better than nothing.

It was probably the two lovers that did most of the job of convincing Zach to play along with their request, Jornak suspected. Still, he was the one who organized the whole effort and he was very proud of it. The next six months were a great time, possibly the happiest in Jornak’s life. He did not intend to betray Zach at that time, not at all – the boy was his best friend, and Jornak had every intention of helping him out in any way he could.

But alas… six restarts had eventually passed. The second deadline started to approach. Tempers ran high. People started asking Zach for a way to prolong their time looping status, horrified that they were about to lose everything they had achieved during these past six months. Zach’s mood continually worsened, both from him being heartbroken that the people he spent the past six month with were about to become lost to him, and the fact they were constantly badgering him about a solution that didn’t exist. That he couldn’t provide.

Jornak’s friendship with Zach also started to gradually deteriorate as the end approached. Jornak was far more interested in politics of the state and in what was happening behind closed doors of their nation’s elite. He had come to know much, and he grew more disgusted with them than he ever had been. He talked to Zach often about these issues, but the boy was just a teenager at heart, and his perspective was narrow and naïve. He simply wanted to get back at his caretaker, start rebuilding his House, and have fun. He did not appreciate the knowledge Jornak had painstakingly gathered, and found his methods to be immoral and disturbing. As the end of their temporary looper status approached, they clashed more and more frequently, and Jornak made the mistake of telling Zach exactly what he would do if he were in his place. The look Zach had given him when he stopped talking… Jornak would always remember that…

Eventually Zach called for a group meeting. He swore again and again that he wasn’t hiding any methods of prolonging their looping, and that there was nothing he could do. He promised them he would make them all temporary loopers again as soon as he could.

He also privately promised Jornak he would supply his future looper with all the work he had done in those six restarts, but Jornak didn’t believe him. The boy hadn’t even read the last two reports Jornak gave him, much less memorize them. Even if he wanted to hand future Jornak the fruits of his work, how would he do it? Not to mention that he probably didn’t even want to do it. He doubted Zach would even make him a temporary looper in the future. He remembered Zach’s admission that he eventually dropped people from his social circle after interacting with them for a few restarts. He remembered the look Zach had given him not too long ago. And he decided he had to do something.

He had never planned to betray Zach. He’d wanted to work with him. To help him. When one really though about it, Zach was the one who betrayed him.

Jornak himself was not a powerful man. His magical aptitude was entirely average, and not even the time loop could change that. But some of the people in the looper group were magically powerful, and their skills had only gotten better due to Zach’s willingness to help them grow. Getting them to side with him was tricky, but not too difficult. Desperation made people do previously unthinkable things. Contacting Quatach-Ichl and arranging a meeting with him without being immediately killed had been harder, but not nearly as hard as he had feared it would be. From that point on, everything kind of slid into place.

In the end, that path had led him here: locked in a deadly battle against his one-time best friend and fellow time travelling companion – Zach.

He had to admit, he had been pretty worried for a while. The ability he’d gotten from Panaxeth was not nearly as effective as he thought it would be. Weren’t primordials supposed to be on the level of gods? He expected more out of primordial magic, to be honest. That prison should have taken some kind of advanced, specialized magic to get out of, but Zach had an appropriate spell for breaking it already in his arsenal.

Then, when they were pulled back into Cyoria proper, it was just in time to see Zorian banish Quatach-Ichl back to his phylactery with the help of a… flower? He dimly recognized it as a soulseizer chrysanthemum. What an obscure magical creature. In any case, he was of two minds about this. On one hand, he needed the ancient lich to win this. On the other hand, it was satisfying to see the black-hearted bastard finally get knocked down a peg or two. And besides, he still had the dragon m-